Jim! Look at me getting a response from the big cheese!
All is good over here. Both healthy. Jonnie will be retiring soon and I guess I will too. We're looking forward to it. More time for movies and making stuff like furniture. How are you?
I read the Carnac page (thank you for the link). I guess it doesn't like my filename format (probably because of the lower case 's' and 'e' which I find easier on the eyes when looking through a Windows Explorer folder or missing episodes). If Carnac can't read it then I guess I'll change my future filenames to something it can read.
Extremely off topic but you make furniture? Super cool. Would love to see what you've built.
If you're looking at transforming a large # of media files to conform to a naming spec, Filebot can be indispensable.
There's also TMM if you're after scraping static metadata, it has a renamer but I've never used that feature.
I personally am a big advocate for static metadata stored alongside the media files. It vastly simplifies identification in software as you can then have truly unique IDs for said media (In my case, my authoritative ID is the IMDB ID but most people, without API access to IMDB, would possibly do better with the TMDB ID, I keep both but IMDB ID is what I 'use'). This way you're not relying on the software to guess what movie, or episode of a show it's looking at.